The Lightening Men

by John Coleman; Burroughs Burroughs; John Coleman; Burroughs Burroughs

  They came to an abrupt halt in the center of a large well-lighted chamber. On every side was still further machinery, great glass cylinders, huge storage batteries. Overhead was a web-like maze of wires. Massive cables jutted out of walls, ran to the huge square and cylindrical glass condensers that loomed above their heads.

  “With an arrangement like this,” breathed the myopic professor, “with condenser accumulators of unbelievably high dielectric capacity, they can pull in and actually store the unthinkable power of Nova Terra’s lightning.”

  “Lightning Men!” mused Mai. “No wonder they could crumble our lightning shafts into sandpiles.”

  “That high-static ultra-short wave machine could do it!” cried the professor. “And Mai,” he exclaimed, “look at that hook-up over there! See how they’ve insulated the ship against lightning blasts.”

  “Try to remember it,” said Mai. “So you can use it for our ships. They could certainly use some insulation.” “Extremely interesting,” mused the professor. “I’ll make a note of this.” “Notes won’t do any good now!” gulped McWeety. “If you ask me, we're done for! I don’t like — ”

  A section of the metal floor in front of them suddenly rolled aside. The Arkians gasped.

  They were standing on the edge of space. Two thousand feet below on the shore of a red sea rose the giant copper domes of twin cities. Sirius, the rising sun, sent down crimson shafts of light to mingle with the myriad reflections of distant lightning blasts that danced over the domes.

  Spearlike minarets of varying heights rose from the hemispheres into the turbulent clouds above, giving the cities the appearance of two giant sea-urchins washed from the restless ocean. It was awe-inspiring in its sheer beauty.

  “Look out!” came Mai’s instinctive shout of warning as he felt the floor give way beneath his feet. For a horrible clammy moment they seemed suspended in mid-air. Then they hurtled down through cold space — toward the twin domes two thousand feet below!

  Once again Mai felt that invisible power tug at his body, slow down his dizzy descent. That diabolical magnet gun was controlling their fall, delivering them to a fate he could not even guess.

  As they fell, Mai studied the twin domes and the long slender minarets shooting from them. The later were apparently a form of lightning rod.

  Each dome, obviously solid metal, must be for further insulation and for the purpose of grounding the charges on all sides of the city beneath it. Mai was certain they were composed of the precious Nova metal.

  “What vast mines of ore must lie beneath those domes,” thought Mai. “And what a haven for the doomed Arkians.”

  A moment later the falling Arkians shot through an opening in the nearer hemisphere and found themselves standing on solid ground within the city. Immediately another magnetic source gripped them, raised them a few inches above the ground, and sped them forward.

  About them towered buildings of weird and fantastic design. Through winding deserted streets they moved, into dark, dismally lighted corridors and empty rooms. The dust of ages had settled over all. Several times they caught fleeting glimpses of moving distorted things in the denser gloom. It was a city through which moved ancient memories. All was mystery and utter silence.

  “An amazing innovation, these magnetic avenues,” commented the professor, observing his legs dangling beneath him as they sped along. “Makes city travel quite effortless and a pleasure. Very ingenious.”

  Ahead loomed a dark tunnel opening. The corporal gasped.

  “If we go in that opening we’re done for — I feel it in my bones!” McWeety sought to break free from the invisible bonds that held him. But it was like fighting the onward sweep of a raging torrent.

  Once into the black opening the men could see nothing. Mai sensed a winding, twisting route. Several times they passed faintly luminous branches to the dark tunnel.

  “These magnetic ‘avenues,’ ” commented the professor, “are obviously laid out to comply generally with the lines of force flowing between the poles of a very large magnet.”

  Suddenly they burst into a brilliantly lighted room.

  “Great Void!” gasped Mai when he could adjust his eyes to the brilliant light that almost blinded him.

  Before them was a gigantic laboratory and auditorium combined. The electrical mechanism on the mystery ship was as nothing compared to this intricate maze of wires, conduits, batteries, dynamos, and insulators. A fantastic assortment of other weird apparatus challenging the wildest dreams occupied every foot of the stagelike floor at one end of the auditorium. The rest of the huge chamber was given over to tier upon tier of seats — thousands of them.

  Occupying central positions in the vast array of scientific equipment were two gunlike pieces that towered considerably above the others. It was toward one of these two instruments that the Arkians were being led.

  Below the gunlike instrument along a massive control panel several rectangular glass chambers stood upright in line against the wall.

  “Glass coffins!” murmured McWeety, gazing wide-eyed at the chambers.

  “That control board,” whispered Mai to the professor, “and all those dials and levers — that means there must be someone or something to operate —”

  “Great Sirius — look!” cried the corporal.

  Out of the shadows behind the stage came an astounding swarm of living things. Grotesquely distorted creatures they were, like the brain spawn of a surrealist’s nightmare. Living, animated “hands” tottered along on tiny, shrunken legs.

  Mai rubbed his eyes. It was as if someone had cut off a human hand, enlarged it to the size of a man, given it a couple of inadequate legs, and then imbued it with life. But no two of the creatures were of the same shape. Some had two massive arms and hands with no visible body, head or legs. They swung along on their knuckles. Others were all legs with no arms or heads.

  Like a swarm of insects they climbed, swung, and leaped to what were apparently prearranged positions at the various levers and wheels of the control mechanism. In specially designed seats the misshapen horde commenced their work. As they manipulated the mechanism in startling efficient manner, the professor leaned over to Mai.

  “Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “These things can’t be the — er, Lightning Men!”

  “No, I think not,” whispered Mai. “It’s my guess we haven’t met the rulers of the city yet.”

  “It’s amazing the way those creatures work,” gasped the professor. “It looks as if they’d been specially created as ‘hands’ for a specific function. An astounding example, no doubt, of evolutionary over-specialization.”

  One at a time the Arkians were placed before a large apparatus that immediately caught the professor’s fancy.

  “It’s some form of ultra-short ray machine,” he whispered to Mai. “Unless I’m greatly mistaken they’re either studying us or photographing us by short wave.”

  The next moment each of the Arkians was magnetically thrust into one of the coffinlike glass chambers standing upright against the wall. Mai heard the bolt slip into place and he was locked in his crypt. Quickly his eyes wandered to the glass chamber next to his. He caught his breath at the astonishing sight.

  “Lord!” he exclaimed half aloud. “It can’t be!”

  CHAPTER III - Maid of Nova Terra

  A girl was studying Mai with wide, puzzled eyes. A mass of lustrous black hair fell down on well-rounded shoulders. She was dressed not as the women of Arkadia, but in strange trappings of blue silver. Her tiny feet were shod in sandals of gold.

  It was incredible — another race of human beings on a planet fifty-two trillion miles from the lost Earth! Could it be, thought Mai, that upon any planet in the Universe wherever life exists, evolution has but a single goal — man?

  He smiled and the girl returned it warmly. Then her body suddenly stiffened. Mai’s eyes flashed to the great funnel-shaped gun towering above them. A group of human “hands” had manned the huge machine, whatever it was, a
iming the device straight at the girl’s glass cell. A heavy dynamo at its base thrummed dismally. Red sparks spat from the armatures. The girl flung a brave, fleeting look to Mai. Then her body became rigid.

  The huge gun poured forth a shimmering, miragelike stream of waves. The girl’s arms raised slowly above her head, stretched horribly—grew to three times their normal length, moving around to grow from the back of her neck.

  The beautiful face wrinkled, the soft skin grew furrowed. Her head was actually shrinking! Suddenly it collapsed, shriveled to the size of an orange. The arms slowly fused together, sagged forward over the tiny cranium like the drooping branches of a tree.

  Where the hands had been was now a single rakelike appendage with fifty tentacular fingers. Heavy muscles swelled upon the back to support this great arching arm. Relentlessly the stream of quivering waves poured from the gun, moved over the girl’s entire body until there vanished all resemblance to the beautiful woman she had been.

  As suddenly as it commenced, the ordeal ended. The creature that had been the girl relaxed, a living, utterly transformed thing.

  Mai’s body tensed spasmodically. An electric shock seared through his body.

  The great gun was aiming at him!

  A sensation of alternate swelling and shrinking tore at his flesh. Every cell in his body and brain was being bombarded, seemingly ripped from its structure.

  How clearly his mind was working, thought Mai. No pain. Diabolically clever fiends, those Lightning Men. They were master electrical wizards, tearing protons and electrons from their orbits, fitting them into some ghastly preconceived pattern, half human, half monster. Yes, that was it — a pattern from that ultra-short ray machine.

  Mai’s head was shrinking. His arms grew longer and stouter, his shoulders hunched forward, and his legs swelled. Finally his hands and feet changed, developed huge suction discs on palms and soles.

  In a moment his metamorphosis was complete. The distorted creatures operating the transformation device swung the huge gun toward the next glass cell.

  In the thick glass of the chamber Mai saw his reflection — a long-armed, massive-legged creature with a saddlelike hump on his back. Instinctively now he had the urge to walk on all fours, as if he were a beast of burden. Suddenly he realized that all those distorted, misshapen creatures — the living “hands,” the “legs,” the “arms,” all had once been normal human beings like himself and that girl.

  MAL looked quickly to the adjoining cell. But the girl was gone.

  Hours later, the electromagnetism force gripped him again. He was deposited into a cold dismally lighted dungeon. Dark shapeless things stirred in the gloom. Something was coming toward him from the pulsing, distorted mass of shadows.

  Mai clenched his fists. Straight toward him came a massive “hand,” advancing on tiny legs.

  “Mai!” came a small voice. “Mai!” it sounded again. “Don’t you recognize me?” It stood before him, a living “hand” whose tiny face just below the “wrist” and above the inadequate legs peered up at Mai. The Arkian commander gasped.

  “Great Sirius — Roto! You?”

  “Galactic goose-pimples! But I’m glad you’re here, Mai!” exclaimed the faithful little Arkian major.

  “Void, what a nightmare!” breathed Mai.

  Hopping along on one splay-footed leg, a single arm growing from the top of its head, came another creature.

  “Quite ingenious — q u i t e ingenious !” came a familiar voice from the pogo-stick, one-legged man-thing.

  “I don’t like this,” whimpered the corporal, rolling along.

  And so they came out of the shadows, pitifully, and surrounded Mai — all the former Arkians that had been captured and transformed.

  “It’s unbelievable!” breathed Mai, stunned.

  “It’s true all right,” piped Roto. “But wait’ll you see the real brains of this city.”

  “You’ve seen them, Roto — the Lightning Men?”

  “Yeah — they’re horrible!” Roto shuddered. “But smart as whips — world’s champion work-dodgers is what they are. They hate work so much that they spend their lives catching other Nova Terrans and changing them into slaves to do all their work for them. Every slave is transformed into a shape that’ll make him the most efficient possible ‘machine’ for his particular job. You, Mai, are a ‘horse,’ made to carry a Lightning Man in that saddle hump on your back. Those suction discs on your hands and feet keep you from falling down; they cling to any kind of surface. I’m made especially as a ‘hand’ to operate more efficiently one of their smaller airships.” “And I’m to dust the king’s books!” exclaimed the professor, scratching with a single dust-mop hand all that remained of his learned brow.

  Mai surveyed the pitifully distorted creatures that were his friends. Slashing into his mind was the horrible realization that a similar fate awaited all his people in Arkadia.

  “Professor, we’ve got to get out of here! We can’t let this happen to Rador and the rest. Do you think there’s any chance of our bodies being changed back again into our original forms?”

  “I have little doubt the process can be reversed,” said the professor. “It merely consists of electromagnetically increasing or decreasing tissue growth in specific areas of the body. After photographing our cellular arrangements by some type of short wave device, and with the resulting photographic plates as guides, each of us was transformed according to a predesigned pattern.

  “The funnel-shaped gun in the laboratory fired an electromagnetic beam of controlled wave length at certain portions of our bodies. The effect of this beam is to increase or decrease the valence or attractive force of the carbon atoms within the organic compounds comprising the tissue cells of our bodies. Thus the other atoms held in the organic chain or ring assume greater or lesser distances from the central carbon atom. Inasmuch as molecules compose each tissue cell, then the consequent result of the beam is expansion or contraction of tissue cells. It’s really quite ingenious.”

  Out of the dark shadows came a strangely formed slave. Mai instantly recognized the girl he had seen transformed. Her soft, fluid voice, its tones familiar, spoke to him.

  “She’s warning you against trying to escape from the city of Sangorong,” interpreted Roto. “It’s death to try.”

  Mai looked his amazement and Roto grinned.

  “I learned the language last night,” he said. “I can understand and speak it, but I’m damned if I know why. Like everything else on this planet it’s got something to do with electromagnetism or electricity. All you do is relax and think of the idea you want to put across. For some reason the exactly correct words or noises come to your tongue and you simply say them.”

  “That’s been one of Rador’s pet theories,” murmured Mai. “That there are certain phonetically natural sounds for the ideas that are common to all thinking creatures.”

  The girl spoke again. Inexplicably, Mai now understood her.

  “Since I was very young,” she was saying, “my people have said that no one escapes who is once captured by the Lightning Men.”

  “Who are you?” asked Mai. “And where do you come from?” Uncannily Mai voiced the strange words.

  Her shriveled lips parted in a smile. Somehow Mai could think only of the lovely woman she had been before that awful transformation.

  “My name is Noovia, and my country lies within a protecting crater, far beyond the big ocean. Six days ago a terrific storm swept me to sea in my insulated flier. My fuel was gone and I came down to drift. Next morning I washed up on a strange shore where no lightning struck. I hid my ship and set out to find where I was. I soon beheld these twin cities, just as the Lightning Men discovered me. I was captured and brought here. That lazy beast Thego loves music. He had me recreated with these fifty fingers just to play his quintachord — it has fifty keys.”

  She was studying Mai.

  “No, strange man, you cannot escape Sangorong. The walls, the tunnels — everywhere they
have eyes and ears.

  They know everything you say and think!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mai, puzzled.

  “When you meet their ruler, King Thego, you’ll find out. You’ll see that these slaves are used for more than just work. What they really want is — ”

  A sound at the far side of the vault brought every eye to the heavy prison door. It had risen. A distorted slave was being pulled out of the room. Then the door closed.

  “He’ll soon know what the Lightning Men seek,” whispered Noovia.

  The only break in the following hours of intense silence and waiting was the occasional opening of the great door as a luckless slave was withdrawn into the blackness of the tunnel. As the heavy portal closed behind the last slave, Mai rose to his four legs.

  Most of the slaves were asleep. Casually he moved to the wall next to the great portal and lay down. In two hours the door again opened. One of the slaves was being returned to the prison. As the gate slid downward Mai slipped quickly into the blackness beyond.

  Immediately he felt the tug of magnetism upon him. He felt himself being transported through Stygian blackness. As he approached a faintly luminous tunnel intersection he thrust out a long arm. His suction cup hands clung tenaciously to the smooth metal surface. With an effort he pulled himself into the intersecting tunnel. He was out of the magnetic avenue. Ahead loomed an opening.

  Cautiously, Mai peered into a cavernous dungeon. As far as he could see into the greenish luminosity, there were visible row upon row of coffinlike cells. Glass coffins, each with a man within it! But what men they were. Fully eight feet tall, perfectly proportioned. It just couldn’t be! First Noovia, then these Earthlike creatures, identical except for size to a race that once lived upon a dead planet trillions of miles away. Yet here they were before his very eyes — apparently dead, yet their breathing chests told him they were not dead.

  No other sign of life, no other sound relieved the awful stillness. It was a tomb of the living dead. Awed, Mai moved toward the nearest cell. The man in it was a handsome creature. Suddenly he realized that they were all identical in appearance. As the electric shock tensed his muscles, instinctively he drew back. And in that same instant from somewhere above a loud voice shattered the deathly silence.